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Table of Contents
NAV user guide
Network Administration Visualized can be divided into two parts: A set of back-end processes and a web-based user interface. The back-end processes are responsible for collecting and analyzing data from your monitored equipment and for performing various background maintenance and administrative tasks. The web-based user interface's main task is to present the collected and analyzed information to the network administrators and other users, and also to allow the administrators to perform administrative tasks such as editing the list of monitored equipment, control other users' access to the web interface, set up maintenance tasks, post operational messages and so forth.
Although you may distinguish between an administrator and a user, this document is about using NAV; the network administrator(s) will usually also be the NAV administrator(s), and so will also be a NAV user in this context.
The web interface
The index page
The main index page of the web interface displays a set of configurable links and contact information, a configurable welcome message, the latest operational messages (if any), and a shortlist of the current status of your devices (i.e. it lists devices that are down).
The configuration files for the various configurable information bits above are located in the webfront configuration subdirectory.
| Config file | Purpose |
|---|---|
welcome-anonymous.txt | The welcome message displayed to anyone who is not logged in |
welcome-registered.txt | The welcome message displayed to logged in users |
contact-information.txt | Displayed in the contact information box |
external-links.txt | Displayed in the external links box |
nav-links.conf | Internal links to your NAV system, displayed to everyone who has access to the particular URLs |
Despite the dubious .txt extension on most of these files, HTML can be used in them. nav-links.conf has its own special format.
The top part of each page contains the NAV logo and a navigation bar. The links displayed on the navigation bar are configurable per user account, by selecting the *Preferences* link.
The toolbox
The web interface is divided into several tools, which can be found on the toolbox page. The default navigation bar contains a link to the toolbox. Most users who have been using NAV for a while will configure their navigation bars with direct links to their preferred tools, so that they can be reached from anywhere within the web interface.
These are the available tools as of NAV 3.2:
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Edit database | Manual entry of data into the NAV database. Most importantly, this is where you specify what IP devices to monitor . This will be the first tool to use after having installed NAV. |
| User administration | Users with administrative privileges can use this tool to create accounts and groups, and grant privileges to parts of the web interface. |
| Alert profiles | Allows each user to flexibly configure one or several personal alert profiles, so that he/she will receive only NAV alerts that are interesting to him/her. |
| Status | Displays the current status of your network, i.e. which devices or services are unreachable (down/shadow) at the moment, which devices or services are on maintenance and so on. |
| Report | Configurable SQL reports which give an overview of the contents of the NAV database. |
| Network explorer | Displays your network topology as an expandable tree |
| Traffic Map | An interactive Java applet that displays your router and vlan topology as a 2D diagram, with colored links between nodes to indicate traffic load |
| Statistics | Browse graphs of statistical data (collected by Cricket and NAV), or view ranked lists of specific statistics (such as “What routers had the highest CPU load the last 5 minutes?”) |
| Machine tracker | Find out where given client machines are connected in your network, by searching collected ARP and CAM data from routers and switches |
| IP Info Center | |
| Layer 2 traceroute | |
| Syslog analyzer | |
| Arnold | |
| Messages | |
| Maintenance tasks | |
| Device management |
The back-end processes
